On-Site Analytics track and measure the site visitor’s journey from the moment they reach your website. With On-Site Analytics, you can see what works – and how well (measure ‘drivers’ and ‘conversions’);

Define what is important to your organization.

Set goals.

Develop a digital marketing strategy to achieve goals. *Note: unless your organization has an endless supply of money, you will want to measure the Return On Investment (ROI) from investing in the following digital marketing channels (I will address Digital Marketing ROI in another post):

Be prepared to learn that you have an ‘ugly baby’ for a website (and possibly an ‘ugly baby’ for a digital marketing campaign as well!). That’s okay. The whole idea here is to reach your organization’s goals. The improvement of certain aspects of your website and your digital marketing campaign will move your organization further along the path to reaching its defined goals.

Now that you have gathered Internet data on your digital marketing efforts:

Verify the accuracy of the data. (I.e. Compare your website’s data as shown through Google Analytics, to direct analysis of the raw server logs). What is it they say? Trust, but verify.

Ensure the validity of the reporting (ideally two reports; the first being a snapshot of data relevant to focus; the second being an overall site metrics. The combination of these two allows context and perspective).

Interpret the data.

LEARN from the data. (What worked? What did NOT work?)

Identify issues, roadblocks, challenges.

Adapt (improve strategy).

IMPROVISE/INNOVATE (improve, change, create or eliminate) your:

tactics,

functionality,

products,

services.

OVERCOME CHALLENGES. If you don’t fail, you can’t learn. Remember that every digital marketing campaign fails to a certain degree. Embrace the experience, dissect the elements that are lacking, and pay attention to what your audience is telling you.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Evolution of Web Analytics.

The definition of Web Analytics and On-Site Analytics continues to evolve, and the methods and tools used for Web Analytics continually evolve. To ensure optimum accuracy and effectiveness, your organization needs a resource (person) to be continually integrating new techniques, tools and functionality of existing tools.

About the Author:

Joe Wooldridge is the Founder of a Digital Marketing Coalition company in Kansas City and Austin, TX called MYJOECARD.COM. Naturally this article is connected to Joe’s Google+ profile. It also links to Twitter if you're into that.